Rethinking Business Resilience: The Role of Digitalization and CSR Policies

Dear Colleagues,

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted our lives, developing from a global crisis to an unparalleled economic shock and leaving aside none of the multiple facets of our economies and societies: health, education, employment, investments, trade, etc. (Bigot et al., 2021). By far, the non-financial economy has been most hurt by the physical distancing and restrictions imposed by governments, particularly in manufacturing industries, hospitality, and transportation. Meanwhile, other sectors, such as ICT, including e-commerce, have considerably grown during the pandemic, since they became the pillars of survival for households and companies alike, supporting the provision of necessary goods and services, as well as providing work from home. Digitalization has been put forward as the “winning card” of business transformation during the pandemic, as a way of fostering companies’ ability to survive in an adverse environment but, further, as a proactive strategy to build resilience and competitiveness in normal times (Katz et al., 2020). This may be achieved through the implementation of big-data-based analytics, digital technologies (such as social media and freeware), data-driven management decisions and others to support increased collaboration between employees, management and shareholders and heightened visibility for customers and business partners, with the aim of increasing businesses’ agility and ability to adjust to potential shocks. The pandemic reminded businesses and organizations of how dynamic and unpredictable the environment they operate in became, driven by new products and services arriving to markets, the quicker adoption by customers of innovative business propositions and the increased obsolescence of existing offerings. In this environment, sustaining competitive advantages over the long run is a difficult endeavor, and increasing resilience to shocks may have a beneficial influence on long-term competitiveness. However, digitalization has recently become a strong supporter of more focused corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies, by creating opportunities for value creation and opening the doors to new business models through enabling enhanced communication between businesses and stakeholders about the former’s policies and actions in social responsibility (Huang et al., 2020; Cheng et al., 2021). Hence, once high-quality CSR disclosure increases stakeholders’ perception of robust involvement in society, this leads to social resilience to shocks outside management control (Lv et al., 2019). Jointly, operational and social resilience are two of the pillars behind long-term resilience, although the complete set of factors that determine increased business resilience is yet to be unveiled by research.

In this Special Issue we welcome theoretical and empirical research papers, as well as review papers, that explore the multifaceted interplay between digitalization, CSR and resilience in businesses and other organizations. Insights into the channels and practices that promote sustainable performance and long-run resilience when faced with exogeneous shocks are also targeted by the Special Issue. We encourage the submission of contributions that discuss various drivers of increased adoption by businesses of digitalization and CSR policies, as well as papers that address specific industries’ and companies’ approaches to resilience through the implementation of digital strategies and/or CSR policies. The main, but not exhaustive, topics we propose are the following:

• Digital transformations, innovations, and business resilience;
• Digitalization strategies for corporate sustainable performance and for sustainable development;
• The impact of CSR strategies on building a resilient company;
• Direct and mediating role of CSR in achieving business performance;
• Market valuation of CSR practices and disclosures/CSR and firm value/CSR initiatives and firm financial performance;
• Digitalization-led CSR and business transformation;
• E-commerce, digitalization, and artificial intelligence;
• Digital skills for business resilience;
• Digitalization and resilient entrepreneurship.

References

Bigot, G.; Germon, R. Resilience, digitalization, and CSR’s three pillars to develop robust post-COVID MSMEs. J. Int. Counc. Small Bus. 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/26437015.2020.1852061.

Cheng, G.; Cherian, J.; Sial, M.S.; Mentel, G.; Wan, P.; Álvarez-Otero, S.; Saleem, U. The Relationship between CSR Communication on SocialMedia, Purchase Intention, and E-WOM in the Banking Sector of an Emerging Economy. J. Theor. Appl. Electron. Commer. Res. 2021, 16, 1025–1041.

Huang, W.; Chen, S.; Nguyen, L.T. Corporate Social Responsibility and Organizational Resilience to COVID-19 Crisis: An Empirical Study of Chinese Firms. Sustainability 2020, 12, 8970. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12218970.

Katz, R.; Jung, J.; Callorda, F. Can digitization mitigate the economic damage of a pandemic? Evidence from SARS. Telecommun. Policy 2020, 44, 102044.

Lv, W.; Wei, Y.; Li, X.; Lin, L. What Dimension of CSR Matters to Organizational Resilience? Evidence from China. Sustainability 2019, 11, 1561. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11061561.

Prof. Dr. Alexandra Horobet
Prof. Dr. Magdalena Radulescu
Dr. Taoufik Bouraoui
Prof. Dr. Tomasz Bernat
Guest Editors

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• digitalization
• CSR
• resilience
• value creation
• business policy
• strategy
• sustainability